This is chapter 27 from my book “Living with a Full Cup.”

This is an old story that happened to me a while ago when living in Auckland, New Zealand. Like most mornings, I would go down to my local nature reserve to do my Taiji training. It was just me, the ducks, geese, and a few joggers. Watching these birds, I learned many things, and this lesson is one I would like to share with you.

One day, just before training, I saw a very sickly looking duck with most of its feathers missing sitting in a muddy patch, not moving. I felt sorry for her, but I didn’t know what to do. I picked her up, and put her in the big pond and hoped that she just needed to be back in the water with the other ducks and that would fix her. After I finished my training, which took about an hour, I went back to the pond hoping she had swum away with the other ducks. I couldn’t see her, and I thought, Great! Now she is not my problem or concern. I looked down, and at my feet, the duck was sitting motionless and too weak to raise her head. I thought, Damn! Now what am I going to do?

I picked her up and put her on the grass. I sat down beside her, talked to her, and stroked her back. During this process, I witnessed my mind working out all the ways to get out of this position. Oh well, I thought. Ducks die all the time; it’s not my responsibility. Maybe somebody else will come and look after her.

My mind was working so fast to come up with a reason why it wasn’t my responsibility to help her. But as I sat there looking at the poor defenseless duck, I realized that this hadn’t happened by chance, so I picked her up, took her home, and made a cage for her to help protect her.

On the way home, a woman stopped me and told me what to feed the duck and how to help her. What a coincidence—out of all the people in Auckland that morning in the park was a woman who knew exactly how to help sick ducks—or was it? I must admit, I didn’t think the duck was going to survive. She couldn’t even stand up. After a couple days of spoon-feeding her and using the recipe the women had given me, she started to eat the food I put in a bowl in front of her. I noticed that after a few more days, she could hold up her head. I fed and talked to her each day. After about a week, I woke up and went out to feed her, and she was standing up! It was a very cool feeling. I kept her for another week, and during this time all her feathers started to grow back. She started spreading her wings and flapping them and even started pecking at me when I fed her. The time to release her had come.

I put her in a box and carried her down to the pond for the big release back into the wild. It felt like one of those Walt Disney wildlife films: I get to the pond, place the box down, open it up, pick her up, and put her in the water. She starts to swim, shaking her head and tail before swimming off into the distance. I said my goodbyes as she swam away, but she didn’t look back once to acknowledge or thank me. She just swam off. I sat there, feeling sadness. I had seen all these wildlife programs where the animal turned back and their eyes met with their savior or they came back for a final pat to say goodbye. Not my duck. With my duck, I got nothing. As I sat there with a feeling of emptiness, I realized that the message in this encounter was not about acknowledgment. It was about doing what I knew was the right thing to do in my heart. 

The whole incident taught me not to have expectations when I do something for another being.